Top 45 Gary Oldman Quotes

My passion and energy get mistaken for anger.

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you’re writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don’t have to do it over.

But you see, I have played more good guys than I have played villains.

I applaud anything that can take a kid away from a PlayStation or a Gameboy. That is a miracle in itself.

At 23 it was all about acting. Today it’s getting my kids to school, making sure that they’ve done their homework. I’m in my fifties, and I’m turning into a square.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

I had a guitar when I was 6 or 7, a plastic guitar with the Beatles’ faces on it. It would be a collector’s item now. It would fetch a hefty sum, I imagine.

Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.

Over the years, I have been asked to play these sort of scary frenetic characters that express their emotions physically.

It’s funny: I’m a lifelong musician, but because I principally play the piano it’s been a solitary thing.

And of course I’ve got kids of my own now, and they love me being in the Harry Potter films. I’m now part of a phenomenon. You become incredibly cool to your kids, and you get a young fan base. So you became the cool dad at school. You’re suddenly hip.

I’m not the best audience for that because I’m not a great science-fiction fan. I just never got off on space ships and space costumes, things like that.

I took a bit of a back seat, I had kids and I wanted to focus on them. There’s that period in the late ’90s, the early 2000s, where I didn’t do a great deal.

I wasn’t ever a huge fan of comics. Just not one of those kids, you know?

Shakespeare doesn’t really write subtext, you play the subtext.

I know what it means to do a job… I worked in a factory. I respect people in the service industry. What irritates me more is when people aren’t respectful. There’s a lot of nonsense behavior, especially in a place like Hollywood. The money, the power, they create little monsters.

At the Oscars, if you didn’t vote for ’12 Years a Slave,’ you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn’t share, but it’s not like I’m a fascist or a racist. There’s nothing like that in my history.

I’m rarely asked to play the smartest man in the room.

I love the simple poetry of theater, where you can stand in a spotlight on a stage and wrap a coat around you, and say, ‘It was 1860 and it was winter…’

We lived in a flat that you could pretty much fit in my current kitchen. No wonder people drink! I can’t understand why they don’t throw themselves off the balconies.

It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone’s idea of that.

I did have a knack for playing weirdos. There’s still sort of this perception of me out there as being this crazy guy.

The building of America has had its fair share of mistakes, but it’s a constitution that’s the jewel of democracy, the envy of many, and it’s the most generous nation in the world.

There’s no handbook for parenting. So you walk a very fine line as a parent because you are civilizing these raw things. They will tip the coffee over and finger-paint on the table. At some point, you have to say, ‘We’re gonna have to clean that up because you don’t paint with coffee on a table.’

I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with me. I would imagine that when it comes to romantic comedies, my name would be pretty low down on the list.

When I decided that I might want to do acting for a living – I don’t know where it really came from, since there was no school play or any of that – my mom gave me her blessing. I had to get a scholarship – that was the only way I could have gone to drama school.

Interesting things come your way but as you get older, your lifestyle changes. I don’t want to travel; I don’t want to be in a hotel room away from my family.

Growing up in a particular neighborhood, growing up in a working-class family, not having much money, all of those things fire you and can give you an edge, can give you an anger.

The thing a drama school can’t give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can’t be taught, and you have to have intuition. It’s an essential ingredient.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it’s Gary Oldman crying; it’s not the character crying.

So Harry Potter came in and it is nice that I have kids of the right age. I took them to London and they walked around the set and met Harry Potter and that is thrilling.

I still don’t have a publicist. If I’m in a film, you have an obligation to promote it, I’ll do as much as I can.

I never told my father I loved him before he died, and I have a lot of issues about that. They’re all swimming around in my head, in my heart, unresolved, and in a way it felt fitting to dedicate the film to him.

I just think political correctness is crap.

I tend to read non-fiction.

I don’t go to premieres. I don’t go to parties. I don’t covet the Oscar. I don’t want any of that. I don’t go out. I just have dinner at home every night with my kids. Being famous, that’s a whole other career. And I haven’t got any energy for it.

Culturally, politically, everywhere you look… Read the newspaper. Go online. Our world has gone to hell.

I want my weekends off and I want to put my kids to bed. Those are good reasons to want to be in ‘Batman 2’.

Rather like Batman, I embody the themes of the movie which are the values of family, courage and compassion and a sense of right and wrong, good and bad and justice.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

What’s fascinating is that when you write a script, it’s almost a stream of consciousness. You have an idea that it means something, but you’re not always sure what. Then when you get on the set, the actors teach you.

I’m almost incapable of lying. I’d be a terrible spy.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

‘Nil By Mouth’ was a bit autobiographical, but as I always pointed out at the time, that’s not my dad.

If one could have a wish, or an alternative life, I would’ve liked to have been John Lennon.